Phillips Brooks Quotes

O, do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks! Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle. But you shall be a miracle. Every day you shall wonder at yourself, at the richness of life which has come to you by the grace of God.

Be patient and understanding. Life is too short to be vengeful or malicious.

Christ is the Word of God. It is not in certain texts written in the New Testament, valuable as they are; it is not in certain words which Jesus spoke, vast as is their preciousness; it is in the Word, which Jesus is, that the great manifestation of God is made.

The true way to be humble is not to stoop until you are smaller than yourself, but to stand at your real height against some higher nature that will show you what the real smallness of your greatness is.

Stand up, on this Thanksgiving Day, stand upon your feet. Believe in man. Soberly and with clear eyes, believe in your own time and place. There is not, and there never has been a better time, or a better place to live in.

Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones.

Pray the largest prayers. You cannot think a prayer so large that God, in answering it, will not wish you had made it larger. Pray not for crutches but for wings.

Character - Some day, you will be wrestling with the great temptation, or trembling under the great sorrow of your life. But the real struggle is here, now, in these quiet weeks. Now it is being decided whether, in the day of your supreme sorrow or temptation, you shall miserably fail or gloriously conquer. Character cannot be made except by a steady, long-continued process.

O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie! Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by.

Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger, which he knows that he was meant and made to do because he is the child of God.

Jesus Christ, the condescension of divinity, and the exaltation of humanity.

I do not pray for a lighter load, but for a stronger back.

Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks.

Charity should begin at home, but should not stay there.

The earth has grown old with its burden of care, but at Christmas it always is young, the heart of the jewel burns lustrous and fair, and its soul full of music breaks the air, when the song of angels is sung.

The ideal life is in our blood and never will be still.

The best advisers, helpers and friends, always are not those who tell us how to act in special cases, but who give us, out of themselves, the ardent spirit and desire to act right, and leave us then, even through many blunders, to find out what our own form of right action is.

Tomb, thou shalt not hold Him longer; Death is strong, but Life is stronger; Stronger than the dark, the light; Stronger than the wrong, the right; Faith and Hope triumphant say Christ will rise on Easter Day.

The trouble is that I'm in a hurry, but God isn't.

O, do not pray for easy lives.

Life is too short to nurse one's misery. Hurry across the lowlands so that you may spend more time on the mountain tops.

If man is man and God is God, to live without prayer is not merely an awful thing: it is an infinitely foolish thing.

A man who lives right, and is right, has more power in his silence than another has by his words.

Happiness is the natural flower of duty.

We do not want to lose our grief, because our grief is bound up with our love and we could not cease to mourn without being robbed of our affections.

No one ever fell under the burden of the day; it is only when the burden of tomorrow is added that the load becomes unbearable.

Distrust your religion unless it is cheerful, unless it turns every act and deed to music and exults in attempts to catch the harmony of the new life.‎

How silently, how silently The wonderous gift is given! So God imparts to human hearts The blessings of his heaven. No ear may hear his coming, But in this world of sin, Where meek souls will receive him still, The dear Christ enters in.

Nothing lies beyond the reach of prayer except that which lies outside the will of God.

Death is strong, but Life is stronger.

Anger is self-immolation.

Christmas day is a day of joy and charity. May God make you very rich in both.

We may say that on the first Good Friday afternoon was completed that great act by which light conquered darkness and goodness conquered sin. That is the wonder of our Saviour's crucifixion. There have been victories all over the world, but wherever we look for the victor we expect to find him with his heel upon the neck of the vanquished. The wonder of Good Friday is that the victor lies vanquished by the vanquished one. We have to look deeper into the very heart and essence of things before we can see how real the victory is that thus hides itself under the guise of defeat.

Self-confidence is either a petty pride in our own narrowness, or a realization of our duty and privilege as one of God's children.

The more man becomes irradiated with Divinity, the more, not the less, truly he is man.

There is no life so humble that, if it be true and genuinely human and obedient to God, it may not hope to shed some of His light. There is no life so meager that the greatest and wisest of us can afford to despise it. We cannot know at what moment it may flash forth with the life of God.

Christianity helps us face the music even when we don't like the tune.

The essence of that by which Jesus overcame the world was not suffering, but obedience. Yes, men may puzzle themselves and their hearers over the question where the power of the life of Jesus and the death of Jesus lay; but the soul of the Christian always knows that it lay in the obedience of Christ. He was determined at every sacrifice to do His Father's will. Let us remember that; and the power of Christ's sacrifice may enter into us, and some little share of the redemption of the world may come through us, as the great work came through Him.

No man dares to condemn the Christian faith today, because the Christian faith has not been tried. Not until men get rid of the thought that it is a poor machine, an expedient for saving them from suffering and pain; not until they get the grand idea of it as the great power of God present in and through the lives of men; not until then does Christianity enter upon its true trial and become ready to show what it can do.

Preaching is truth through personality.

Everywhere the flower of obedience is intelligence. Obey a man with cordial loyalty and you will understand him.

Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.

Obedience completes itself in understanding.

We are haunted by an ideal life, and it is because we have within us the beginning and the possibility of it.

Bear with the faults of others as you would have them bear with yours.

Feed on Christ, and then go and live your life, and it is Christ in you that lives your life, that helps the poor, that tells the truth, that fights the battle, and that wins the crown.

The form of godliness may exist with secret and with open wickedness, but the power of godliness cannot.

The earth has grown old with its burden of care, But at Christmas it always is young.

Pray for powers equal to your tasks.

The faith which you keep must be a faith that demands obedience, and you can keep it only by obeying it.